The NHL Entry Draft is held each June, allowing teams to select players who have turned 18 years old by September 15 in the year the draft is held. The draft order is determined by the previous season's order of finish, with non-playoff teams drafting first, followed by the teams that made the playoffs, with the specific order determined by the number of points earned by each team.[3] The NHL holds a weighted lottery for the 14 non-playoff teams, allowing the winner to move up to the first overall pick.[4] The team with the fewest points has the best chance of winning the lottery, with each successive team given a lower chance of moving up in the draft.[3] Between 1986 and 1994, the NHL also held a Supplemental Draft for players in American colleges.[5] Detroit's first draft pick was Peter Mahovlich, taken second overall in the 1963 NHL Amateur Draft. The Red Wings have chosen first overall three times, selecting Claude Gauthier in 1964, Dale McCourt in 1977, and Joe Murphy in 1986. McCourt and Murphy both spent some time in the NHL with Detroit, but Gauthier never played in the league. Twelve picks went on to play over 1,000 NHL games, while two of these, Nicklas Lidstrom and Steve Yzerman, played in over 1,500 games, both spending their entire NHL careers in Detroit.

The 1989 Draft has been noted as having been exceptionally successful for Detroit.[10] While team executive Jim Devellano stated the team would be satisfied with two players from that draft making it to the NHL, seven of them did so.[10] Those seven players (Mike Sillinger, Bob Boughner, Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Shawn McCosh, Dallas Drake and Vladimir Konstantinov) have amassed 5,995 games played, 1,227 goals, 2,367 assists, 3,594 points and 5,108 penalties in minutes. That draft has also been marked as signalling a paradigm shift for Detroit as prior to that the club was very reluctant to draft players from outside North America.[10] Since then the club has drafted a large number of European as well as other non-North American players. In 2000, for example, they drafted four Swedes, three Russians, two Canadians, one Slovak and one American.[11]

Statistics are complete as of the 2012–13 NHL season and show each player's career regular season totals in the NHL. Wins, losses, ties, overtime losses and goals against average apply to goaltenders and are used only for players at that position.

List of all players drafted by the Detroit Red Wings and their statistical accomplishments[11][12]